There's a considerable amount of cheekiness in the name the War on Drugs, given the Philly roots-rock ramblers' preference for reverb, drone, and heady 10-minute jams. But with his new solo effort, WOD bassist Dave Hartley takes a more sincere approach to the name game-- Nightlands is quite literally a bedroom recording experiment, in which Hartley attempts to translate hazy, morning-after remembrances of last night's dreams into songs that try to recapture their feeling, if not their meaning. With its reliance on analog synths, drum machines, angelic harmonies, and shape-shifting structures, the music of Nightlands bears almost no relation to the music of Hartley's better-known day gig, or the open-road reveries of fellow WOD member Kurt Vile-- Forget the Mantra is less War on Drugs than simply brain-on-drugs.
"Dreamy" is often used in a rock-crit context as a synonym for serenity and ecstasy, an interpretation that belies the fact that our dreams are often confusing, disturbing experiences comprised of inexplicable imagery and occurrences. It's this ambiguous sensation-- hovering in that netherworld between the foreign and the familiar, the comforting and the haunting-- that Hartley successfully conjures on Forget the Mantra. On the surface, the album sounds less like a document of Hartley's deep-sleep exploration than a gauge of how Brian Wilson's influence on indie-rock has mutated and manifested itself over the past 15 years, recalling at various times the space-age soft-rock of the High Llamas, the choral pastorales of Fleet Foxes, and the phantasmagoric psych-pop of Panda Bear. But Hartley proves himself adept at putting these customary melodic and harmonic devices to devious use, whether setting the hypnotic, repeated refrain of the opening title track to a jarring, jack-hammered drum break, or shattering the bucolic bliss of "God What Have I" with an anodyne chorus of voices asking the ominous question, "oh my, oh my god, what have I done?"
In keeping with the dream concept, Forget the Mantra turns stranger and more inscrutable the deeper you venture into it. The album's back half is given over to more amorphous, lengthier pieces that interlace found spoken-word recordings with wordless harmonies, hypnotic folkie finger-picking, and manipulated string and synth textures. Though never quite degenerating into "Revolution 9"-style sound-collage splatter-- Hartley carefully layers the myriad elements onto purposeful, dramatic arcs, particularly on the eerily compelling "Longways Homebound, 2010"-- Forget the Mantra's enigmatic second act tends to blur the line between music that's meant to evoke a dream state and music that lulls you into one. But, ponderous lapses aside, Nightlands' psychic terrain is still a nice place to visit, even if you wouldn't want to spend the whole night there.
